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28 WINES&VINES October 2018 PACKAGING Give This Person a Cigare: The Doon and Dirty of Wine Packaging Lessons learned on wine packaging from an eventful and impactful career in winemaking By Randall Grahm I t is a pleasure to discuss wine packaging and labeling, a subject I never imagined I would be qualified to talk about, but something about which, like it or not, as an entrepre- neurial winery owner, I have been compelled to try to master. I began in the wine business with the rela- tively ambitious intent to make The Great American Pinot Noir, which is to say, a wine more or less thoroughly Burgundian in style, as I understood that to be. I felt it important to signal my intense and sincere Francophilia in this earliest effort, so I more or less copied the style of the Louis Latour and Hubert de Montille labels. This was, for me, my very introductory course, Wine Labeling 101, if you will. The label was so simple and elegant. In fact, in the begin- ning I just wanted to make simple, elegant wines and wine labels and, of course, naively believed I could just let the wine itself do the relevant salesmanship. (Boy, did I have a lot to learn!) Some of the very earliest labels included "Vin Rouge," which was a blend of Grenache and Cabernet Sauvignon, and "Claret," which was a Bordelais blend – a pretty austere de- sign. Same basic concept as the Pinot Noir, but without the benefit of varietal designa- tion. Thank goodness that in the 1980s selling wine was a lot easier to do than today. These bottlings, as you might imagine, did not ex- actly set the wine world on fire. Unless one is faced with something like an existential threat, one generally does not have the disposition to venture too far out of one's comfort zone, and probably if the Pinot Noir had been a runaway success (it wasn't) I may never have had the occasion to think up vivid, memorable and oh-so-clever labels. But as they say about the prospect of one's imminent de- mise having the tendency to focus the mind, there are certainly comparable dynamics at work in the world of very challenging wine selling and packaging. While my original intent in getting into the wine business was to produce The Great Ameri- can Pinot Noir, I soon discovered that my Pinot project was not working so well, and I needed to pivot in a very significant way and find a different focus for the winery if I wanted to stay in business. I spent some time with a fairly obscure Al- banian wine merchant called Kermit Lynch, who had a little store in Albany, Calif. Kermit was, and is, a great fan of the wines of southern France. I had a simple idea that maybe the grape varieties of southern France would be well-suited to the Central Coast of California, a hypothesis that has in fact luckily been borne out. In the interest of staking out some well- differentiated territory with essentially no competitors, "blue ocean" as they say, I set out to produce a sort of homage to Châteauneuf- du-Pape. But what to call it? My first thought was that I needed to somehow clue customers into the fact that it was a wine made in the style of a Châteauneuf. But how could I do it in a way that was not totally lame and forced? My own pretentions notwithstanding, I had always thought that domestic wine labels pre- tending to be quasi-French were more than a little pretentious, if not just doonright silly. Still, I wanted to give customers a context for under- standing the wine — remember that no one then knew anything at all about Rhône varieties — as well as to signal that my wine was très French in inspiration, if not in style. Of course, at the same time I did not want to be seen as a copycat. What I needed to do was make a sly and witty reference to Châteauneuf and to show the world how cool and witty and non-copycat a New World copycat could be. I came up with the name "Old Telegram," which was of course a reference to one of Kermit's Châteauneufs, Vieux Télégraphe. In all my years in the wine business, people al- ways ask me, how do I come up with all of these label ideas? EDITOR'S NOTE The following is a shortened version of the keynote speech by the author at the Wines & Vines Packaging Conference. Randall Grahm, owner/winemaker, Bonny Doon Vineyards. CODY GEHRET